- “This is no constitutionally governed state,” one Finn who was fined nearly $50,000 moaned to The Wall Street Journal, “This is a land of rhinos!”
Outrage among the rich—especially nonsensical, safari-invoking outrage—might be a sign that something fair is at work.
There are only a few people in the world that would have me hunting for the annual reports of Helsinki before I've had my coffee. SO HERE'S THE PROBLEM In the United States, a disturbing percentage of operational budgets comes from fines and civil forfeiture. For example, the DEA has an operational budget of $30b a year and they take about $300m a year from people who don't even end up charged with a crime. For example, here's the budget for Los Angeles. Of LA's $9b budget, a billion dollars comes from "other fees, fines and taxes" of which nearly $200m comes from parking tickets alone. Helsinki's budget, on the other hand, includes the line "0 million euros" from a dog tax. Here's the 2017 report of the Finnish police. As an American this in and of itself is novel - the idea that a nation has a "police department" rather than the patchwork of fiefdoms we have here. Between my house in Seattle and the birth center 10 minutes away we go through two jurisdictions; between my house and the airport I go through one city, the state police (on the freeway), another city, and then when I get to the airport I'm dealing with the port police and none of those guys cooperate (or draw from the same budget). You'll note that they get zero money from fines. In fact, they whinge on there about how their income went down because 68m in revenue from red light cameras went to the department of transportation rather than them. That's all of Finland. My town in WA, official population 38,000, makes about $2m a year on red light cameras. That's part of the operating budget. That's what we keep the roads paved with. That's what pays for the fire department. The incentives are completely asymmetrical. Nowhere in Finland is there a cop sitting on an empty road waiting for tourists to come by at 5mph over because there's no other way to keep his kids' school open. And, not to put too fine a point on it, Finland is ethnically homogeneous. If you get pulled over in Finland, it's because you're speeding. Nobody in Finland has ever heard "sorry, sir, I thought you were Mexican" like I have in Los Angeles. Nobody in Finland has ever given up his Ferrari because he was sick of being pulled over three times a week like my Ph.D-in-Ethnomusicology-teaches-at-Cal-Arts-Worked-With-Quincy-Jones black neighbor. There's a fundamental assumption in Europe that police operate fairly, assuming you aren't one of those dirty brown people from Syria or Algeria. There's a fundamental assumption in the US that the police are robbing, prejudicial privateers. In the US this would become a rapper-and-basketball-player tax. What you'd see is massive tickets against African Americans who were uppity enough to buy a BMW or Mercedes. It would become a mechanism by which the trade school crackers with badges and guns could shake down those uppity negros in their too-good-for-us rides and it would be ugly.
OK, kleinbl00, what rustles my jimmies is the word homogeneous. I'm so rustled that I actually bothered to register a new account because I couldn't remember my old one. See, the table your source lists only accounts for 1st generation immigrants. 2nd, or nth generation immigrants are going to be included in the top category. So it doesn't give a very good picture. For example, 20% of kids under 7 years in the capital area have a foreign family background (Sorry, it's in Finnish only and as a new user I'm not allowed to post links, so here's a manual source link: stat.fi/til/vaerak/2017/02/vaerak_2017_02_2018-06-20_fi.pdf). 18% of people living in Vantaa have a foreign background. Third+ generation immigrants are no longer counted as having a foreign background, so 18% of Vantaa residents are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants. Sure, it's not as diverse as the US in terms of Mexicans per capita, but certainly that's not homogeneous by any stretch. I can accept you calling the countryside, where 60% of ethnic finns live, homogeneous. But I find this irrelevant, partly because the police doesn't want to waste their limited resources on sitting by empty roads, and partly because there's not going to be any Mexican driving a Porsche around there anyway. > If you get pulled over in Finland, it's because you're speeding While the police is generally very professional, racial profiling is still an issue (English, check it out: yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/study_ethnic_profiling_in_finland_continues_despite_legal_prohibition/10142700). > Nobody in Finland has ever heard "sorry, sir, I thought you were Mexican" This is likely right, but "Sorry, sir, I thought you were Russian" probably isn't.
Welcome! I appreciate your input, and I appreciate you keeping me honest. At the same time, you need to understand that my neighbors to the west are Laotian, my neighbors to the east are Mexican, my neighbors across the street are Armenian and here in LA, at least, the odds that any service or labor staff speak more than broken English are slim. Growing up, I had to cross thirteen separate native reservations if I wanted to play minigolf. Rustled jimmies or no, you have not compelled me to reconsider Finland to be an ethnically diverse nation.
If a punishment falls below the threshold of perception, it's not a punishment. A guy who can afford a Ferrari can and will laugh off fines unless they are proportional to his income. A loss of $200 matters when your take home per week is $500. A loss of $200 when your take home per week is $80k is almost literally nothing. As typical for me I end with a Heinlein quote."Corporal punishment in schools was forbidden by law," he had gone on. "Flogging was lawful as sentence of court only in one small province, Delaware, and there only for a few crimes and was rarely invoked; it was regarded as 'cruel and unusual punishment.'" Dubois had mused aloud, "I do not understand objections to 'cruel and unusual' punishment. While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment -- and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mecahnism?
his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment
I’m trying really hard to understand what this guy thinks he’s saying. Like, does he think if we fine rich people more money poor people will just forget that the fine they could get for speeding will really affect their financial situation ? Is this just another rich guy pretending to care about poor children because he doesn’t want to stop speeding ? Casey Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has valid concerns about them. “An income-based system might appear to ‘help the poor,’ but that's forgetting the victims of those crimes,” he says. He notes that income imbalances between neighborhoods could create disparities in the incidence of reckless driving. “Do we want more speeding past schools in poor neighborhoods than in rich neighborhoods?
I think what he’s saying is that at some point the penalty is too low and the time has no value or the price of the ticket isn’t worth the officers time.. Seattle has already started to have this problem where crimes where the city will not enforce laws against hobos and addicts. It’s not worth the officers time to arrest someone who is on heavy drugs and committed property crimes because the processing will take a long time and the tiny penalty is not a deterrent. It’s really hard to punish people who are living near rock bottom without going either way overboard or not being effective.
So, the point of it being income based is that the cost of the fine will have an impact on everybody getting the fine, not just poor people. The price being too high for rich people while simultaneously too low for poor people doesn’t really fit. Maybe he was poorly quoted, but he didn’t mention quotas which isn’t really a problem with this type of fine, it’s a problem with police. If it was public knowledge that I didn’t do my job all month and had to scramble to finish it at the end I wouldn’t be very highly regarded. Having said that even if the problem stays and we change the fines they could simply make the quota about the number of fines as opposed to the amount of money coming in.
I can only see some value in his argument if this policy also meant that overall ticket prices are lower, which would disporportionally favor the less well off. But I think he's just one of the whining ones. As if a CEO would've earned $102k otherwise...Mulligan also points out that because some penalties involve time in custody, in court, or in jail, the system does, to an extent, mete out justice equally. “The value of the time component of a penalty is proportional to the penalized person’s value of time,” he says. In terms of earnings potential, an hour of a CEO’s time is worth a lot more than an hour of a janitor’s.